Ronald Reagan

Hollywood is fighting back over Will Ferrell’s abandonment of the Reagan-with-Alzheimer’s “comedy.” Two Hollywood tabloids have offered additional details about the plot and nature of the film. How bad was the script? This bad: here’s the Hollywood Reporter: It turns out Reagan is actually a good-natured and well-researched comedy that offers an “alternate take” on seismic events in American history — a direct descendent of 1999’s Dick, in which Kirsten »

Ronald Reagan swept to two landslide victories on the strength of his famous three-legged stool—economic conservatism, social conservatism and an internationalist, hawkish foreign policy. But the elements of the Reagan coalition have been drifting apart for some time, and the alliance now appears to be irretrievably fractured. I was talking recently with a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, and when the conversation turned to politics, he said something »

Any honest assessment of Will Ferrell comedies would have to say they are uneven. The first Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby are classics; Get Hard, Step Brothers, and Blades of Glory, not so much. The best you can say about the next Ferrell vehicle announced yesterday, in which he will portray an Alzheimer-impaired President Reagan being manipulated by his staff, is »

For those near a TV set around 3:45 Eastern (about one hour from this post time), I’m scheduled for a short CNN segment to comment on the CNN documentary on the 1980s airing this evening at 9 pm Eastern and Pacific time. Tonight’s segment is about the Reagan Revolution, and CNN taped me for two hours last fall for this installment. I haven’t seen the segment, so I’m not sure »

News out in the last hour that Nancy Reagan has passed away at 94. I don’t have much to add beyond the obvious—that she was a significant influence on her husband’s career and course once in office, though I also think her influence was distorted or overstated in some ways. I didn’t write about her much in my two Reagan books in part because I became convinced that the most »

John Sears, Ronald Reagan’s one-time campaign manager, once said “discipline is nine-tenths of politics.” And, as Tevi Troy reminds us: Candidate Reagan put Sears’ dictum into action, running a relentlessly focused communication operation that kept to its message of the day, often to the consternation of the reporters following the campaign. This approach continued into Reagan’s presidency. As the authors of All the President’s Spin put it: “Ronald Reagan’s administration »